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A monumental account of one migrant community’s everyday lives, struggles, and aspirations 

Forty years of continuous war and conflict have made Afghans the largest refugee group in the world. In this first full-scale ethnography of Afghan migrants in England, Nichola Khan examines the imprint of violence, displacement, kinship obligations, and mobility on the lives and work of Pashtun journeyman taxi drivers in Britain. Khan’s analysis is centered in the county of Sussex, site of Brighton’s orientalist Royal Pavilion and the former home of colonial propagandist Rudyard Kipling. Her nearly two decades of relationships and fieldwork have given Khan a deep understanding of the everyday lives of Afghan migrants, who face unrelenting pressures to remit money to their struggling relatives in Pakistan and Afghanistan, adhere to traditional values, and resettle the wives and children they have left behind. 

This kaleidoscopic narrative is enriched by the migrants’ own stories and dreams, which take on extra significance among sleep-deprived taxi drivers. Khan chronicles the way these men rely on Pashto poems and aphorisms to make sense of what is strange or difficult to bear. She also attests to the pleasures of local family and friends who are less demanding than kin back home—sharing connection and moments of joy in dance, excursions, picnics, and humorous banter. Khan views these men’s lives through the lenses of movement—the arrival of friends and family, return visits to Pakistan, driving customers, even the journey to remit money overseas—and immobility, describing the migrants who experience “stuckness” caused by unresponsive bureaucracies, chronic insecurity, or struggles with depression and other mental health conditions. 

Arc of the Journeyman is a deeply humane portrayal that expands and complicates current perceptions of Afghan migrants, offering a finely analyzed description of their lives and communities as a moving, contingent, and fully contemporary force.

In the 1980s, Texas A&M University’s NAN Ranch Project included surveys and excavations in Gavilan Canyon, a major tributary of the Mimbres River. Uniquely, these excavations documented water control systems and their uses. Collected and now made available for the first time, Archaeological Investigations in Gavilan Canyon shares results from the excavations that were conducted primarily at Pueblo Vinegaroon, a Classic Period Mimbres pueblo of about twenty rooms, and at nearby Cholla Village.

During the NAN Ranch Project, researchers conducted extensive surveys of the canyon from its confluence with the Mimbres River and documented numerous sites dating to as early as Early Archaic through Classic Mimbres. The results also document pithouse sites as well as numerous small masonry pueblos. Analysis shows that the ebb and flow of late prehistoric occupation in Gavilan Canyon largely matches the occurrence of wet periods and prolonged droughts. 

The book reveals that the changes in occupation in Gavilan Canyon help explain changes seen in the Mimbres River Valley, including the extensively excavated NAN Ranch and Swarts sites.

Illuminating the impact of archaeology on the culture and politics of Latin America

Since the mid-nineteenth century, archaeology has played a critical role in historicizing space and shaping cultural imaginaries. It has brought modern scientific practices into structured contact with ancient objects and landscapes, on the one hand, and modern Indigenous cultures in their material and historical complexity, on the other. Archaeology has thus served a variety of disciplines and practices, from history and anthropology to literary and social criticism and critical theory, and has actively animated practices quite distinct from itself, such as public policy, tourism, urban planning, art, literature, and nation-building.
     
This volume provides a unique analysis of a disciplinary formation crucial to the study of cultural history and theory in Latin America. The contributors represent archaeologists and scholars from a variety of disciplines within the humanities, each of whom approaches archaeology as theory and praxis. Collectively, they map the differences and similarities between archaeological interventions and the ways in which the materiality, practice, and discourse of archaeology have been taken up as analytic, metaphor, and discursive strategy.
 

Architectures of Hope examines how communal idealism, electoral politics, and low-income consumer markets made first-time homeownership a reality for millions of low-income Brazilians over the last ten years.

Drawing on a five-year-long ethnography among city planners, architects, street-level bureaucrats, politicians, market and bank representatives, community leaders, and past, present, and future beneficiaries, Moisés Kopper tells the story of how a group of grassroots housing activists rose from oblivion to build a model community. He explores the strategies set forth by housing activists as they waited and hoped for—and eventually secured—homeownership through Minha Casa Minha Vida’s public-private infrastructure. By showing how these efforts coalesced in Porto Alegre—Brazil’s once progressive hotspot—he interrogates the value systems and novel arrangements of power and market that underlie the country’s post-neoliberal project of modern and inclusive development.

By chronicling the making and remaking of material hope in the aftermath of Minha Casa Minha Vida, Architectures of Hope reopens the future as a powerful venue for ethnographic inquiry and urban development.

A journey through the United Fruit Company’s photo archive and its documentation of corporate expansion into the Caribbean.

The establishment of the United Fruit Company as a global political agent with its banana plantations was met with considerable resistance. Now the company’s photographic records are the focal point of Archive Matter as it examines photography’s historical and political impact through the argument that this overlooked, but important, archive made capitalist expansion into the Caribbean possible.

Author Liliana Gómez examines the images from within their “optical unconscious” and via the archive’s silences and omissions. The implication of these silences, Gómez argues, is the attempt to conceal the violence embedded within the realities of the plantations’ daily operations and corporate efforts to “modernize” the Caribbean.

Drawing on a remarkable combination of early twentieth-century field notes, archaeological evidence, historical accounts, and the voices of Arikara collaborators, Arikara Agriculture: Mother Corn’s Gift to the Sahnish People offers a richly layered account of one of the Plains’ most accomplished agricultural societies. 

Living along the Missouri River in present-day North and South Dakota, the Sahnish (Arikara) people cultivated expansive fields of corn, beans, squash, sunflowers, and other crops, sustaining vibrant communities and extensive trade networks. At the heart of this remarkable book are the invaluable records of ethnobotanist Melvin Gilmore, who documented the knowledge of Arikara elders between 1916 and 1924, capturing a lifeway on the cusp of profound change.

More than a historical study, this volume foregrounds the cultural, spiritual, and ecological significance of agriculture in Sahnish life. The contributors discuss how corn was the center of the Arikaras’ world and how it, and other agricultural crops, were important not just as food but also for the culture. The book illuminates traditional horticultural methods, food preparation techniques, and the enduring relevance of these practices today. 

Both a vital contribution to ethnobiology and a community-centered preservation of knowledge, this work speaks to ongoing conversations about Indigenous foodways, resilience, and the revitalization of traditional ecological knowledge.

An inside look at the promises, pressures, and paradoxes of American military life in Cold War Germany.

Army life has always been known as a life of sacrifice, challenge, and frustration, yet one filled also with deep satisfactions. This is so for the soldiers’ families as much as for the soldiers themselves. Over the years, military and civilian leaders of the US Army have tried to reduce the hardships of military life by creating an array of community services designed to provide social support for soldiers and families and help them live satisfying lives in military communities.

Unfortunately, this effort has not been particularly successful, and frustration, dissatisfaction, and alienation persist among soldiers and family member in the US Army communities in Germany. Discontent continues because the underlying sources of alienation in the Army and among its families are highly complex, poorly understood, and therefore hardly addressed by the Army’s quality-of-life programs that are intended to make soldier and family life more bearable.

In Army of Hope, Army of Alienation: Culture and Contradiction in the American Army Communities of Cold War Germany, the author seeks to penetrate the logic, social structure, and daily practice of life in the American military communities that lay scattered along the frontier between East and West Germany during the final years of the Cold War. In coming to understand the life and thought of these American soldiers and families, ordinary American citizens can learn much about their military forces and about their own society and culture. In addition, a greater understanding about how people work and live around an institution that is at once so important and yet tasked with a mission so different from that of ordinary pursuits can stimulate social scientists and concerned citizens to think differently about culture, society, and behavior in general.
 

During the last third of the twentieth century, white supremacists moved, both literally and in the collective imagination, from midnight rides through Mississippi to broadband-wired cabins in Montana. But while rural Montana may be on the geographical fringe of the country, white supremacist groups were not pushed there, and they are far from "fringe elements" of society, as many Americans would like to believe. Evelyn Schlatter's startling analysis describes how many of the new white supremacist groups in the West have co-opted the region's mythology and environment based on longstanding beliefs about American character and Manifest Destiny to shape an organic, home-grown movement.

Dissatisfied with the urbanized, culturally progressive coasts, disenfranchised by affirmative action and immigration, white supremacists have found new hope in the old ideal of the West as a land of opportunity waiting to be settled by self-reliant traditional families. Some even envision the region as a potential white homeland. Groups such as Aryan Nations, The Order, and Posse Comitatus use controversial issues such as affirmative action, anti-Semitism, immigration, and religion to create sympathy for their extremist views among mainstream whites—while offering a "solution" in the popular conception of the West as a place of freedom, opportunity, and escape from modern society. Aryan Cowboys exposes the exclusionist message of this "American" ideal, while documenting its dangerous appeal.

Tom Juravich combines oral history with social and economic analysis to provide a vivid account of the multiple challenges presented in today's workplaces. 

Based on extensive interviews with workers in four different industries, this book takes us behind the statistics of the economic collapse and into the lives of Americans who are struggling to make ends meet and support their families.

At a Verizon call center in Andover, Massachusetts, customer service reps find themselves overwhelmed by the pace of work and the constant monitoring. They describe a daily routine marked by regimentation, intense pressure to sell, and unrelenting stress. In New Bedford, undocumented Guatemalans in the fish-processing industry are fired if they don't work fast enough, cheated out of wages, and mistreated by supervisors. Juravich describes a brutal immigration raid by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement that divided families and forced workers further underground. 

Juravich then takes us inside the operating rooms at the Boston Medical Center, where hospital consolidation has brought a new “bottom line” philosophy that has fundamentally altered the way patient care is delivered. Surgery takes place almost non-stop, driving some nurses from their chosen profession and leaving those who remain exhausted. 

The final case study looks at the shuttering of the Jones Beloit plant, an internationally known manufacturer of machinery for the paper industry. Despite the best efforts of highly skilled and productive workers to save their plant, it was abruptly closed and they were abandoned after their CEO recklessly became involved in a shaky foreign investment. 

Juravich argues that workers face a series of paradoxes in the contemporary American workplace. They can no longer assume that large established firms create good jobs. The new working conditions often resemble what was traditionally associated with marginal and low-wage employers. He concludes that we must bring a discussion about the quality of jobs back into the public discourse and that a “good jobs” strategy is a fundamental building block to economic recovery. 

Workers' voices are front and center in this highly readable book. It includes striking photographs by Paul Shoul and a CD that presents a series of audio documentaries with excerpts from the interviews, as well as four original songs written and performed by Juravich.

Industrial agriculture has transformed vast stretches of the Earth, but few places reveal its contradictions more clearly than the Pampas of Argentina. 

In At the Edge of the Pampas, anthropologist Rachel Cypher traces the explosive rise of genetically modified soybeans across one of the world’s great agricultural heartlands. Drawing on immersive long-term fieldwork, the book moves from soybean fields and cattle feedlots to dryland forests to show that industrial agriculture takes many forms. Soy—one of the world’s most standardized commodities—must first pass through local ecologies, informal economies, inherited obligations, and intimate relations of trust before it can circulate as a global asset.

Urgent and deeply original, At the Edge of the Pampas offers a major rethinking of how value is gathered within industrial capitalism and how unruly social and ecological life persists inside even the most engineered landscapes.

The state is often regarded as an abstract and neutral bureaucratic entity. Against this common sense idea, At the Heart of the State argues that it is also a concrete and situated reality, embodied in the work of its agents and inscribed in the issues of its time. 

The result of a five-year investigation conducted by ten scholars, this book describes and analyses the police, the court system, the prison apparatus, the social services, and mental health facilities in France. Combining genealogy and ethnography, its authors show that these state institutions do not simply implement laws, rules and procedures: they mobilise values and affects, judgements and emotions. In other words, they reflect the morality of the state. 

Of immense interest to both social scientists and political theorists, this work will make an important contribution to the ever expanding literature on the contemporary state.